There now exist, in the photo industry, non-conventional films and development processes, which are employed for advantageous reasons, such as reducing the development time.
In the conventional optical printing process, the sensitized print paper is exposed by a light source that has shown through the negative. This method relies on very specific exposure reaction curves designed into the emulsions of the negative film, its development process, and the coatings on the print paper, so that the combination of negative, print paper, and illumination source produces a print that is faithful in its representation of the original scene that was photographed. All processes must therefore be closely adhered to, particularly the development of the negative.
With the advent of digital printing methods and apparatus, much greater control during the printing phase is possible. This in turn has allowed deviation from conventional film and the conventional development process. With this enablement, the developed film is scanned, converting the image information into electronic form, and the fulfillment, for example producing a print, is done separately. In the interim, with the image information represented as digital data, the image can be corrected for the effects of a non-conventional film and/or development. With these methods, the developed negatives are considered to be ‘Scan-Only’, because they will produce inferior or unacceptable results if prints are subsequently produced by the conventional optical printing method. Such poor results cause disappointment for the consumer. The consumer may not accept such prints, further resulting in wasted time and materials for the fulfillment provider. Therefore, there is a need to easily identify such scan-only negatives to avoid optically printing from them.